RobDude - I hear your frustration. Personally, it's been quite some time since I had a *serious* hardware problem. Yeah, I struggled, until about the time Suse 9 came out. With that download, everything "just worked" for me. Things have gotten better since then, as well. But, that doesn't help the guy with this thing, or that gadget for which there IS NO SUPPORT! So, I hear you.

Did you contact the vendor of the gadget that refused to work? Yeah - it's a pain, just one more pain in a long list of pains when the gadget doesn't work. But, I hope you DID contact the mfgr, and give them a good cussing out.

Doing so makes them aware that more and more of the world is using Linux, and that they can make money by supplying a driver for us. I've contacted several, myself. It ain't that big a deal, but if it helps to convince one mfr to support Linux, well, I've done a little bit for the community.

BTW - you are aware that not every distro and/or repository supports the same hardware? If you feel like experimenting, you might try some Live-CD's to see which if any makes your gadget work. Just an idea......

Um. This does happen around the time of every major OS release, especially with Apple and Microsoft.

Apple in particular has a somewhat poor track record for 10.x.0 releases, with the notable exception of 10.6.0. Application compatibility issues aside, Snow Leopard is the first major OS release I've heard of *ever* not to have at least occasional problems during an in-place upgrade. Even Windows service packs are known to break things from time to time.

My anecdotal experience with Karmic Koala has been "so far so good." No complaints here -- nice try trolls!

Really? 10 to 1 is a midrange? Indiscriminant? If you have a good information source, please share. I feel we both want the same thing - fewer dead civilians, but I suspect you are using very bad assumptions.

In the Human Rights Watch report "Troops in Contact" they go out of their way to say that planned strikes result in few civilian deaths, and that the bulk of civilian casualties come from coalition land forces coming under fire and calling in air strikes to take out insurgents who are using civilians as human shields. Unmanned drones, by their very nature, are slow and are not used for close air support of ground troops. A-10s, helicopters, fighters, and even B-2 and B-52 bombers have been used for close air support, some carrying heavy weapons.

Using your reasoning, there would be fewer precision strikes by unmanned drones (carrying missiles with 20 pound warheads) against evaluated targets, and more ground troops under fire screaming into their radios for close air support by aircraft carrying large bombs, resulting in more dead civilians. The whole reason for using precision laser guided missiles such as Hellfire II (used by Predator and other UAVs), is to limit civilian casualties.

because people have been brain washed with the 'all government things are bad' everything else good, regardless of the facts" mentality of the neo cons.

As it turns out, the best way to support a free market is for a social democracy to handle the infrastructure and let the free market compete on top of the infrastructure.

Look at an private service that doesn't continue to make good profit growth. Either it goes away, or if it maintains becomes horrible in the terms of service and maintenance.

For you libertarians out that, I suggest you look at what happened at the beginning of the industrial age before government intervention.If you prefer more recent examples, look at what removing restriction from the financial system did.

Yes, because file sharing destroyed the music business. There are now no original artists making music any more. I lament that sad day. it reminds me of the olden days, when we still had movies before the VHS machine destroyed that venerable business model. It went the same way as radio after the cassette tape.

Legit customers seem to still put a few dollars into these things, even when free is available.

Go stand over there with the RIAA, MPAA and Chicken Little and hang your head in shame. The sky is not falling.

Does this mean I will be losing some of the 7385 MB available for my inbox space? I'm already using a whole 1% of that!

Installing bulkheads will work, whenever you can build them. For the larger lavatubes on the Moon, you would not want to lift the mass of a bulkhead, even an inflatable one. Even then, you must seal the rest of the lavatube, since lava fields are among the most porous rock formations we know of. Whenever basalt cools slowly, it cracks,....it cracks a *lot*, which is a major reason that *most* lavatubes collapse, giving us sinuous rilles on the Moon, and collapse trenches here on Earth. There *are* ways to use insitu resources to seal lavatubes, and make bulkheads. There is native iron and nickel in most lunar regolith, from nickel/iron meteoroid impactors whose metal recondenses on the surface after vaporizing on impact. In some places, it's nearly 1 percent of the regolith. Gather it with a magnetic rake on a telerobot, then dump that into a reaction vessel, and blow carbon monoxide through it at about 160 C at 3-5 atmospheres pressure, and you will make it into iron pentacarbonyl and nickel tetracarbonyl. Distill these to separate them, then break down the carbonyls by lower pressure (.1 Atmosphere) and higher temperature (about 220 C) to get Iron and Nickel powders on a micron size level. Use an electrostatic accelerator to throw the individual powder grains against the lavataube surface at a high enough speed they will splatter and stick to the surface. Build up a seal of the more common Iron component on the rock side of the seal, and then seal that off from water vapor in the future habitat atmosphere with a coating of Nickel, using the same technique as the Iron. For the bulkheads, bring a mold with the continuous curvature of the bulkhead, but only a small part of it. Then coat it with enough Iron to hold the desired pressure, with margin. Then coat that with the same thin coating of Nickel as on the lavatube seal. Use a sub-millimeter thin coating on the mold that reacts with the Iron surface of the bulkhead against the mold to weaken its grip on the mold. When that small section of the bulkhead is thick enough to hold the desired pressure in the habitat, slide the mold to the side, till it barely overlaps, then repeat the 2 coatings, making sure the 2 sections are welded to each other. Repeat this till you have constructed the entire bulkhead in place inside the lavatube. This would give you a safe habitat, with bulkheads and a lavatube seal that do not need to be lifted from Earth. These techniques are especially useful when you look at lavatubes hundreds of meters in diameter, as may well exist on the Moon, because of its low gravity. Till you can do something like this, use pressurized modules, either inflatable modules brought from Earth, or solid modules made from lunar glass-in-glass composites. That will let you get enough crew under the shelter of the lavatube to do the work of sealing a larger lavatube for a lunar community. In the virtual world of Second Life our research team is modeling these processes in a 3-phase development, at the National Space Society Island, in the SciLands Archipelago of Second Life. Some of our papers on this topic are at: http://www.oregonl5.org/l5sr2002.html Regards, Tom Billings